Category Archives: stencil

I made about 20 test runs on white butch­er paper to find just the right col­or com­bi­na­tion. And set­tled on this:

And here’s all the stuff it took to get the paint onto the wall.

The sten­cil is from Trim­belle Riv­er Stu­dios. The room doesn’t have much in the way of long walls so I did a lot of fudg­ing to make the motifs fit.
I used oil paint sticks and sten­cil­ing brush­es. (Shi­va: Olive Green, Yel­low Ochre, (and a lit­tle Barn Red) Windsor/Newton Man­ganese Blue.) First time I’ve worked with paint sticks. Because they have to be smushed onto a pal­lette before you pick up the paint on the brush it takes longer than sten­cil­ing with acrylics but I like the way the paint has dimen­sion on the wall and the fact that the col­ors are some­what trans­par­ent.

Once the sten­cil had had chance to dry I took the fab­ric pan­els off the screen (yeay vel­cro.) I didn’t do any prep work on the fab­ric — poly(?) can­vas. The paint will stick well enough and I don’t expect to try to wash the pan­els. By the time they’re dirty I’ll be bored with them and want to do some­thing else.

To hold the fab­ric steady I clipped it to the thick foam core boards that I use to stretch water­col­or paper. I mea­sured for a rough place­ment for the image and then eye­balled the fine align­ment.

I used brown paint (oil bar) and a large sten­cil brush. Because the sten­cil was paper coat­ed with lin­seed oil I couldn’t use the repo­si­tion­able adhe­sive that I use on plas­tic sten­cils. I used a lit­tle tape in each cor­ner and then worked care­ful­ly hold­ing the lit­tle tabs and bits down with my fin­gers as I paint­ed. It’s messy and a lit­tle slow but worked quite well.

Here’s one of the pan­els fin­ished and propped up for dry­ing.

sin­gle pan­el

I had planned to use two images on each screen. One fac­ing each direc­tion. So I start­ed with the two crows fac­ing left. Two pan­els have the crows in the top half and one has the crow in the bot­tom half. Then I would clean the sten­cil and flip it for the rest.

Oil paint takes a while to dry and I need­ed the flat space­back in my stu­dio so I hung the pan­els back on the screen. Fig­ur­ing that I’d take them down lat­er this week and do the rest of the sten­cil­ing.

pan­els dry­ing

Oh nev­er mind — FINISHED!

And here’s my cel­e­bra­to­ry drink.

cheers

Lil­let over ice and orange slices. The ice cubes are shaped like stars!